Heathrow 3rd runway to provide a good range of destinations purely for exotic leisure travel

Date added: January 6, 2016

Heathrow has been trying to persuade politicians, business leaders, and the world at large that it needs a new runway in order to boost the UK economy, because of all the business flights and vital business “connectivity” connections. Quietly, in the Airports Commission’s Final Report, released on 1st July 2015, the importance of the business and economic benefits were down-played, and more emphasis was put on the desirability of more – and cheaper – leisure flights, how more holidays improved people’s sense of well-being etc. Page 70 said: “Leisure flights have a high social value. Empirical analysis focused on passengers travelling on holiday or to visit friends and family has shown how the access to leisure travel affects mental health and well-being.” And now it emerges that many of the alleged “new” destinations that Heathrow might be able to fly to, with a 3rd runway, are unashamedly purely for exotic holidays. Some of the airports mentioned are Kilimanjaro, making it easier for trekkers and people of safari; Quito, making it easier to get to this UNESCO World Heritage site city; Memphis, where tourists can easily visit Elvis’ former home, Graceland; Salt Lake City, for easy access to the ski areas; and Thiruvananthapuram (Kerala), for the best beaches. So all the devastation and the immense environmental and social impact of a new runway is so rich tourists can have slightly easier trips on their holidays.
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From Heathrow to the snows of Kilimanjaro: Airport pledges far-flung flights in third runway bid

By NICHOLAS CECIL (Evening Standard)

4.1.2016

Heathrow today promised direct links to more exotic and far-flung destinations as it entered a New Year battle to win backing for a third runway.

Its campaign has been largely business-focused as it seeks to beat Gatwick for government consent to expand.

But many of the routes, planned if another runway is built in west London, would also make it easier for Britons to visit more capitals, heritage sites and other tourist attractions.

By 2030, a direct flight would be put on at least once a week to Kilimanjaro International Airport in Tanzania.

Trekkers would then have to travel only a short distance to climb Mount Kilimanjaro, Africa’s highest mountain at 5,896 metres, or set off on safaris in several national parks.

Over in South America, at about half the height of Kilimanjaro, stands the Ecuadorian capital of Quito, which would also be served by a flight. Its old town, with its architectural treasures, has been designated as a Unesco World Heritage site, while tower blocks rise up in the new parts of the sprawling city.

Elvis fans would be able to jump on a plane from west London to Memphis, Tennessee, where the singer’s former home, Graceland, is located.

More than 600,000 people a year visit the mansion, making it the second most-visited house in America after the White House.

Tennessee-bound travellers could also fly direct to its capital, Nashville, to experience its country music venues, visit Civil War battle sites and try its famous hot chicken dishes.

Another direct route would be to Salt Lake City, the gateway to the powder-snow ski fields of Utah, where the Winter Olympics took place in 2002.

“And with direct flights it will open the world up for holidaymakers as well as businesspeople to experience the culture of these flourishing destinations.”

A flight to Thiruvananthapuram in Kerala — hailed by Mahatma Gandhi as India’s “evergreen city” — would cut the travel time to its idyllic Kovalam beach and wildlife sanctuaries.

Further east, travellers looking to follow in the footsteps of Rudyard Kipling and Somerset Maugham would be able to travel to Penang on the north-west coast of peninsular Malaysia, by the Strait of Malacca. While the city is thriving economically, with major industrial developments, it is also popular among tourists who flock to taste the cuisine of Malaysia’s food capital — a fusion of many nations — and visit its beaches, hills and culture.

Londoners would also be able to fly direct to the old port city of Fuzhou, the fast-growing capital of China’s Fujian province, which offers a range of tourist attractions including hot springs.

Flights to Central America will boost links with the bustling metropolis of Panama City, at the Pacific entrance of the Panama Canal, with nearby sandy beaches and rainforests, as well as to Guatemala City.

Air travel makes you happy, says the Airports Commission. That’s why we need more runways

July 4, 2015

The Airport Commission (AC) changed its arguments sharply between its 2013 interim report and the final document. Initially the idea was that there was a need for a runway because of a rising need for business air travel, and vital business routes. Interestingly, in its final report, the AC – realising that the demand for business flights is not growing – has switched to saying it is good for leisure travellers. At Heathrow only at most 30% of passengers are on business, the majority are on holiday, and the rest visiting friends and relatives (VFR). The AC says because air travel and holidays make people happy, put them in a better of mind and give a feeling of well-being, a runway is needed so we can fly even more than we already do. This runway if ever built would, unavoidably, be mainly used for ever more leisure trips. Nothing to do with emerging economies or connectivity, unless the business people help make fares cheaper for the tourists, and vice versa. Having an annual holiday is associated with greater happiness. Whether taken by plane or other modes of travel. Nobody will be surprised. People who are able to take holidays tend to be happier than those that do not. (People involuntarily living with the adverse impacts of an airport may have lower well-being and be less happy).

Air travel makes you happy, says the Airports Commission. That’s why we need more runways

1.7.2015 (Carbon Commentary)

The Airports Commission changed its arguments sharply between its 2013 interim report and the final document of today, July 1st. In 2013, the central idea was that Heathrow should be expanded because of a rising need for business air travel. The UK is missing out, the Commission suggested, because Heathrow did not have sufficient capacity to service desirable locations such as the largest Chinese cities.

Everthing changed today. Now the core argument is that without Heathrow expansion the UK’s leisure travellers would suffer. The Commission tells us that air travel makes people happy (I am only slightly simplifying the text). Therefore London needs more runways so that we can all fly more.

The purpose of this post is to point to what I think is a serious flaw in the analysis of the impact of air travel on happiness. I apologise for straying into econometrics but since the Commission’s report is likely to result in public policy decisions, I believe it is vital that poor and misleading analytic work is scrutinised.

In summary, I say that the Commission’s econometric work does not show that air travel makes people happy. Rather it demonstrates the wholly unsurprising conclusion that having holidays away from home is associated with a better state of mind and health. There is no legitimate ground for the Davies Commission to justify Heathrow expansion on the basis of improved happiness as a result of more air travel. (I’ve tried to make the rest of this article as free from econometrics as I can).

Below is a crucial chart that the Commission didn’t include in the interim report but does make an appearance in today’s document. It’s worth a close look. For the first time we see on Airport Commission headed paper an admission that business air travel is falling. It’s lower in terms of millions of passengers than it was in 2000 down from about 31 million trips to around 29 million.

Any growth that is coming is from leisure travel, either for holidays or Visiting Friends and Relations (VFR). This conclusion is as true for Heathrow as it is for other London and large regional airports. Heathrow is a leisure airport, partly for UK residents and partly for non-residents passing through the airport on the way to another destination.

Simply put, the notion that business needs more airport runways around London is nonsense. If there is any need for more airport capacity, it arises because of leisure travel.

And it is certainly worth pointing out again that many of the leisure travellers that pass through Heathrow are in transit from one non-UK destination to another.

They are of no substantial value to the UK economy. Why the people of Richmond or Hounslow should suffer more noise and traffic disruption to allow more non-UK people to fly on holiday elsewhere is an issue that Howard Davies does not address.

By ceasing to stress the business need for Heathrow expansion, the Davies Commission seems to have finally accepted that the arguments for more runways can only be made by reference to the possibility of rising leisure travel, by UK residents and those from abroad.

That is why we see the following surprising statements early in the Commission’s final report.(There’s nothing remotely like these comments in the interim version).

‘Leisure flights have a high social value. Empirical analysis focused on passengers travelling on holiday or to visit friends and family has shown how the access to leisure travel affects mental health and wellbeing. The findings demonstrate these patterns of travel are associated with higher levels of life satisfactions, general and mental health, and happiness’.

And so it goes on. Heathrow expansion is justified not by the brutal logic of global economics but by an unusual interest in personal happiness. The Commission pulled in consultants PwC [no link to their report is given] to provide the analysis that back up its assertions that air travel makes us feel good. The consultants trawled through published academic research and analysed three large scale statistical studies of personal happiness.

The academic research is limited and not particularly helpful. PwC writes

‘Most of this literature is based on analysis of surveys of small groups of people with specific characteristics or small samples designed to be representative of large populations . None of the studies has conducted empirical analysis using datasets similar to those we have used in our empirical analysis’

So they move on to their three big statistical studies. The first shows reasonably convincingly that having an annual holiday is associated with greater happiness. Nobody will be surprised. If you don’t have a holiday you are likely to have less control over your life and/or be the kind of person who gets little pleasure from leisure. These are clear predictors of unhappiness.

The second PwC study demonstrates, the consultants say, that air travel is associated with a higher level of happiness. This is the conclusion that the Davies Commission leaps upon because it supports the case for more London runway capacity. (Here comes the only bit of econometrics in this article, sorry). However, the statistical work that PwC did for the Commission didn’t split up the respondents into those that travelled on holiday by car, train or bus and those that flew. This second study is therefore picking up nothing more or less than the same phenomenon seen in the first study. If you travel abroad you are likely to be doing so because you are going on holiday. In other words, the second report finds the same conclusion as the first; holidays are associated with happiness, not that people like air travel. There can be no conclusion that air travel causes a higher sense of life satisfaction.

The third statistical study confirms the first. People who are able to take holidays tend to be happier than those that do not.

PwC concludes

‘Our empirical analysis of the UK using three large datasets consistently finds that taking holidays and flights is associated with improvements in health and wellbeing as measured through various indicators of health and wellbeing’.

No it does not. PwCs’ empirical analysis shows that people who take holidays are happier. Nothing more and nothing less. For their money PwC should have done better econometrics. And the Davies committee shouldn’t have based their revision to the reason why London needs more airport capacity on such a weak piece of work.

There’s one more comment to make. In addition to the new focus on leisure, the Airport Commission uses its final report to make the case for Heathrow based on the amount of freight coming in to the airport. This argument is almost shockingly lame. The reason Heathrow takes in more freight tonnage than elsewhere is simply that it has far more inbound passenger flights. The freight that arrives in the airport doesn’t come in cargo aircraft but in the holds of long distance passenger flights. And since Heathrow has almost seven times as many long distance passenger flights as Gatwick it is utterly obvious why it brings in more freight.

The truth remains that London doesn’t need more runway capacity and that the pressure for Heathrow expansion is entirely driven by the understandable desire of the owners of the airport to make more money by running more services. Nothing more and nothing less.

If the UK thinks it can meet its carbon budgets for 2050 by expanding the number of airport runways, delusions have set in very deep. Today’s air travel CO2 emissions of around 40 million tonnes a year will use up almost all the UK’s allowance by mid-century. We cannot meet our carbon budgets by continued encouragement of aviation.

3.5 Leisure flights have a high social value. Empirical analysis focused on passengers travelling on holiday or to visit friends and family has shown how the access to leisure travel affects mental health and wellbeing. The findings demonstrate these patterns of travel are associated with higher levels of life satisfaction, general and mental health, and happiness. 19 [Footnote 19: The full analysis of this topic can be found in the report Quality of Life: Leisure Impacts Assessment, published alongside the Commission’s consultation and in a further report, Quality of Life: Further Assessment published alongside this report.]

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3.6 Leisure travel is also of significant importance for the UK economy. Multi-national businesses operating in the UK recruit from a global pool of talent in IT, creative industries, financial services, advanced engineering and many other sectors. For their personnel the ability to return home easily to visit parents and even children is not a luxury, it is an important part of the package that persuades them to take a job in the UK. The same considerations apply to UK businesses posting staff to important overseas markets. The ability to travel home affordably and conveniently is not just a social benefit, it makes a material contribution to the competiveness of the UK.

…

and also

3.8 The largest industry associated with leisure flights is tourism. The UK has a significant tourism sector which contributes both employment and gross value added to the economy. In 2013 the Tourism Direct Gross Value Added was £56 billion 20 while the most up to date value of inbound tourism is £21.8 billion in 2014.21 The wider UK tourism industry is forecast to grow significantly over the coming decades but of particular relevance to Commission’s analysis is the growing propensity to travel of a rapidly expanding middle class in many developing economies, particularly in Asia. This is a significant opportunity for the UK’s tourism as well as London as a global city with a strong history and an established tourist infrastructure which has great potential to be the starting point for European travel.

[This is a classic case of the Commission – in the same way the aviation industry does – looking at benefits of inbound tourism, and conveniently neglecting the inconvenient flipside. The money taken out of the UK by British people holidaying abroad].

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Page 219

10.17 There is also a benefit to people nationally (as well as locally) through the leisure impacts of the resulting increased connectivity, which could increase access to leisure holidays or visits to see family and friends by increasing the availability of flights to different places, reducing the cost of travel and improving the passenger experience. The Commission’s analysis showed statistically significant positive effects of leisure abroad improving mental and physical health, as well as boosting productivity. The general results of the statistical analysis across all of the datasets is that taking holidays and flights is associated with improvements in health and wellbeing. The only differential impact between socio-demographic groups (e.g. age, income) is that the positive association between having holidays and self-reported general health and depression is stronger for unemployed people than for employed people.

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The Commission also says, by contrast – on the subject of those whose quality of life and well-being is reduced by living with aircraft noise, that:

Page 218

• Living in a daytime aircraft noise contour (over 55 decibels) is negatively associated with all subjective wellbeing measures: life satisfaction, sense of “worthwhile”, happiness, levels of anxiety and positive affect balance, with the negative effect of daytime aircraft noise being greater for people living in social housing.76 To provide a sense of scale, the negative effect of aircraft noise on peoples’ sense of “worthwhile” is around half that associated with being a smoker, and less than a third that of being underemployed.77 The negative effect of aircraft noise on peoples’ happiness is less than half that of being divorced and less than the negative effect associated with living in social housing.78 • Living in a nighttime aircraft noise contour was not associated with any aggregate statistical effect on subjective wellbeing. • Being in a high level aircraft noise contour was negatively associated with happiness and feeling relaxed at that time.

[76 PwC’s analysis also confirmed this result is not driven by the possibility that more social housing is located near to airports

77 Being underemployed can include those who are unemployed, involuntarily in part-time work (i.e. those who work part-time but wish to or could work full-time) and those who are overqualified or underutilised in their current positions